OpenACC Toolkit

The OpenACC Toolkit from NVIDIA offers scientists and researchers a simple way to accelerated scientific computing without significant programming effort. Simply insert hints (or “directives”) in C or Fortran code and the OpenACC compiler runs the code on the GPU.

Simple: Insert compiler hints to instantly tap into thousands of computational cores in the GPU

Powerful: Delivers up to 10x faster application performance

Free: The OpenACC Toolkit with compiler included is available at no charge for academia*

OpenACC Toolkit Features

The toolkit includes a complete set of developer tools designed to provide significant application acceleration with a minimum amount of coding. It features the popular PGI Accelerator Fortran/C Workstation Compiler Suite for Linux, which supports OpenACC 2.0. The compiler is available at no cost for academia. Non-academic developers will receive a free 90-day trial.

Other tools include:

GPU Wizard to identify if GPU-accelerated libraries can accelerate portions of code without any additional programming

NVProf Profiler to easily find where to add OpenACC directives to further increase performance

OpenACC Code Samples to get started with simple and real-world examples

Documentation including OpenACC Best Practices Guide for maximizing application performance

* A Free University Developer license is a special single-user node-locked license to the 64-bit Linux version of PGI Accelerator Fortran/C/C++ Workstation™

How OpenACC Works

With OpenACC, programmer keeps the existing code intact and delivers faster performance when an accelerator is available in the system. The example below shows how OpenACC extends existing serial CPU code or parallel code using approaches like OpenMP.

Performance Portability

OpenACC is designed to deliver powerful performance that is portable across many types of platforms such as GPUs and multi-core CPUs. Performance portability allows researchers to optimize their code just once and expect accelerated results on different processors and platforms.

An upcoming version of the PGI OpenACC compiler can now accelerate code on x86 multi-core CPUs as well as on GPUs. When a GPU is not present the compiler parallelizes for CPU cores resulting in many times faster performance over single CPU core.

This CPU portability feature is in private beta today and is planned for wider availability in the fourth quarter of 2015.